1. Terminology
Fingering of Chords
In standard guitar playing technique, the term fingering a chord is commonly used to refer to the act of simultaneously pressing a plurality of guitar strings to its frets while arranging the pressing fingers in an order that comprises the notes of the designated chord. The act of fingering a note or chord does not refer to or include the act of strumming or plucking the strings. For right-handed players, the act of fingering is accomplished with the left hand of the player while the act of strumming or plucking is accomplished with the right hand.
The terms finger, fingering or fingered are used in the traditional way throughout the description and refer only to the pressing of the instrument strings to the instrument frets, not to the strumming or plucking of the strings. When a string is pressed against a particular fret, a particular note is generated if that string were then plucked. The notation used is the string, e.g., E, A, D, etc., followed by the fret number (i.e., 1, 2, etc.). Thus, “A2” means finger the “A” note string at the second fret, “E3” means finger the E-note string at the third fret, etc. The designated note is then inferred from this notation (e.g., A2 implies that a B note is designated by the fingering, E3 implies that a G note is designated by the fingering). Finger arrangements for chords are commonly referred to as chord forms, chord formations or fingering formations. The guitar technique referred to herein is the traditional guitar technique as described in standard instruction books such as Mel Bay's Modern Guitar Method Grade 1, The Mel Bay Rhythm Guitar Chord System and Mel Bay Guitar Chords from Mel Bay Publications, Inc.
Presets
In many commercially available Musical Instrument Digital Interface (“MIDI”) devices, groupings of data such as MIDI parameters that are stored in the unit memory and accessed as a group by the user are commonly referred to as presets. Certain parameters of this disclosure are programmed by the designer or the user and stored as presets.
MIDI Note #'s and Sharps
The commonly used term MIDI note number will be written herein as MIDI note #. In order to avoid confusion, the # character, commonly referred to as the pound sign, is not used herein to refer to a sharp note as it is commonly used in traditional musical notation. In the present description, notes are designated by using their flat equivalents with the traditional musical notation b after the respective note letter. The term sharp is not used herein. The # character is used herein only to refer to number.
Guitar
The guitar instrument to which reference is made herein is the equivalent of a standard six-string electric guitar that includes components of a guitar such as the Fender Stratocaster or Gibson J-160E and is tuned to standard guitar tuning as described in Mel Bay's Modern Guitar Method Grade 1 unless otherwise described or depicted herein.
2. Discussion of the Related Art
The primary use of the guitar is to provide chord accompaniment for a vocal. When playing chords on a traditional six-string guitar, bass accompaniment can be added only through the use of a live bassist or the use of any of several commercially available accompaniment devices. Use of such devices requires the instrumentalist's musical performance to follow a preprogrammed accompaniment track, and spontaneity is often limited.
Commercially available devices commonly known as guitar synthesizers are electronic guitar systems that reproduce the sounds of other instruments as a guitar is played. Guitar synthesizers utilize a pitch-to-midi technology that responds only to a well-executed picking or finger-picking of individual notes. Guitar synthesizers available from Roland Corporation can perform the task of providing a bass note accompaniment for a note or series of notes played on a guitar to which the synthesizer is connected, but cannot be used to efficiently provide a traditional bass accompaniment when the user is playing chords.
Another commercially available device that is used to generate bass sounds from the playing of guitar notes is commonly referred to as an octave box. Octave boxes cannot produce bass notes from the playing of a chord or chords.
Split-fretted stringed instruments such as U.S. Pat. No. 4,658,690 to Aitken and U.S. Pat. No. 4,986,157 to Matsubara are designed to utilize the instrument as a guitar synthesizer, that is, to actuate synthesized notes that have rhythms that directly reflect the rhythms that are being played on the instrument by strumming or plucking the strings. Such rhythms are inappropriate for simulating traditional bass accompaniment that typically follows the rhythm that is played on the bass drum by the drummer of the ensemble with his or her foot in a rhythm that is counter to that being played by the guitarist of the ensemble.